Philosophy and the Joyful Life

Tag Archives: Communication

This UNESCO World Philosophy Day, 2013, I thought it would be good to look for thinkers who are under appreciated. The (recently) late Henri Bortort is, I suspect, such a thinker. He was a phenomenologist whose major contributions revolve around our approach to complex systems, phenomena which find significance in environmental science, linguistics, business, and digital technology, among other disciplines. (Please excuse the few grammatical errors- it’s a great piece from a fascinating blog.)

Now that I am beginning to lecture and teach complexity, many people are asking me about who I teach, and what my key references are. This is quite a difficult question to answer on a number of levels, especially when you are trying to teach people that “thinking” is just one of the ways of knowing the world, and that “sensing”, “feeling” and “intuition” are just as important.

One very key person who I admire greatly and who I base much of my work around is that of Henri Bortoft, author of the book “The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science”. I remember reading this book for the first time around February 2009, in preparation for my MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher College. I had been recommended this book since Henri teaches the first week of the MSc, and Henri’s philosophy provides one of the foundation stones for…

Maria and I finished our Star Wars marathon this weekend when we watched Episode III – Revenge of the Sith. In this episode we witness Anakin Skywalker’s conversion to the dark side, in order to save Padmé from dying, an event he foresaw in a vision.

On the Blu Ray release there were many great additional features on the bonus DVD, one being a recording of a preliminary meeting of George Lucas and his production team as they develop the series The Clone Wars. George Lucas re-acquaints his team with his vision of the force and his instruction is really worth exploring:

We have a destiny which we follow. We live for a reason, and must discover what it is.

The core of the force, you have the light side and the dark side. One side is self-less, the other is selfish. We want to keep them in balance. What happens…

I’ve been aware of Lacan through semiotics and literary criticism for several years, and over the past weeks I’ve found it impossible to develop my understanding of this aspect of his thought without also studying Lacan the psychoanalyst and philosopher of the self.i But what I want to do is simply to relate some of my own views on the digital phenomena of our age to some of Lacan’s ideas, as I (mis)understand them Read the rest of this entry →

While doing my masters degree at Schumacher College, I took part in the Transition Towns movement in Totnes, and spent time with the Transition Tales team, a small and pioneering team who formed part of Transition Towns Totnes, the first Transition Town in the world. One of the aims of this project is to raise awareness within Primary and Secondary School children of the transition solution of community led response to the twin challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change by creating positive stories. This is done in partnership with local schools in the Totnes area, either as part of class time, or in after-school clubs.

I have written up the history of Transition Tales, how they formed, and how they worked with schools. You can read my essay here which was also published in the on-line journal Energy Bulletin.

This documentary takes its name from a 1967 poem of Richard Brautigan which called for a cybernetically-programmed ecological utopia consisting of a fusion of computers and mammals living in perfect harmony and stability. By contrast, the film implies that humans have been colonized by the machines they have built: although we don’t realize it, everything we see in the world today is through the eyes of the computers. Computers have failed to liberate us and instead have distorted and simplified our view of the world around us. Hugh Montgomery summarised the suggestions made by the film as follows: “By putting our faith in computers [or unfeeling bureaucracies more generally] to create a stable, democratic world order… we’ve become politically and economically naïve and dulled to the business of real social change.” Read the rest of this entry →